Former City bond trader Georgette Hewitt has laid claim to making the worst pitch ever seen on the BBC’s Dragons’ Den show and revealed she was amazed that she still walked away with a £60,000 investment.

Mrs Hewitt, once the youngest female bond trader in the City when she joined the LIFFE German bond trading pit at 18, secured the backing of Dragons Peter Jones and Theo Paphitis for her interactive children’s gift-giving website, ThePresentClub, in the first episode of the latest series.

But her pitch collapsed as she lost her train of thought under the pressure of the studio lights.

“The producers said to me ‘Do you realise you have just made one of the most watched Dragons’ Dens ever?’ because it was so bad. They knew it was going to be good TV. People could see I was struggling and in a world of pain,” said Mrs Hewitt, now 34 and the mother of three young children.

Mrs Hewitt said she was used to confrontational business environments, working in the pits on LIFFE for The Kyte Group in the 1990s as one of the few female traders at the time.

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She also passed the Dragons’ Den audition, where she had to talk for two minutes non-stop about herself, when she was eight months pregnant with her third child, Eloise.

“I have always been used to having lots of stick. It rolls off my back having worked in the City. When Duncan [Bannatyne] had a go at me I think he really liked the business. He was writing everything down and if he hated it why did he do all of that.”

But Mrs Hewitt, from Beckenham, south London, said she still found presenting to the Dragons daunting. She was not helped when two hours before the filming in June she was told she could not show one of the three screen shots she had prepared as part of her pitch. “They told me it was information overload for a TV audience,” she said.

It was mistakenly referring to this board while presenting to the Dragons that contributed to the collapse of her pitch, she said.

“I walked down the stairs and straight into Evan [Davis]. I think I was still a bit frazzled by them and I think I said to him that I can’t believe they invested when I didn’t tell them so much about the business.”

She added: “I don’t think I was happy at that point because of the pitch and I spoke to my husband and said it was awful and then at the end mentioned I did get the investment and he said ‘Hang on’.”

It was then that the upside became clear. Mrs Hewitt’s poor pitch and the positive outcome ensured her a prominent place on the series.

Her site received 1.4m hits on Sunday after the episode was first shown – up from around 200 hits a day – and promptly crashed. She had been warned to prepare for several hundred thousand but not more than a million. “I was devastated,” she says.

But the traffic has continued to rise and ThePresentClub has added 1,500 wish lists in the last week, taking its total user base to around 4,000.

The plan is to attract several hundred thousand users as a result of the funds and publicity that comes from appearing on the show. Mrs Hewitt also owns ThePresentClub.com address giving her the potential to access to the US market. The Dragons see such potential they have also offered Mrs Hewitt – who works on the site by herself – a £20,000 interest free loan to draw on as she sees fit.

The website lets parents and children create wishlists for presents to make it easier for distant relatives or friends attending parties to get them something they actually want.

Individuals can contribute as much as they can afford and the children can see what progress they have made to acquiring the toys they want.

There is an option to donate a present to a children’s’ charity with The Present Club only taking the 3.4pc transaction charge levied by PayPal from the donation rather than covering all its costs.

Despite Mr Bannatyne’s dislike for the venture on the show it was his suggestion during the filming that the children should be allowed to add charity donations to their wishlists rather than just allowing those buying gifts the option to do so that inspired Mrs Hewitt to tweak this part of her site.

Parents also use the site as an online ‘star chart’ – rewarding good behaviour at home and at school with small contributions towards a toy or other gift their child has chosen.

Mrs Hewitt has signed up 25 suppliers so far to provide the range of gifts and hopes to use the Dragons’ contacts to increase that number further.

She is preparing for a second wave when the episode airs for a second time on BBC 2 at 7pm on Tuesday night.

Asked about the feedback from friends and family, she said: “I knew I would get so much stick from the City and they would tell me to get back to washing shirts. But while they said it was painful to watch they have been really positive.”